Area Hack Fires Popgun, Shoots Self Repeatedly In Foot

A conservative writer has options. They could, for example, pursue journalism. Alternatively, they could join with Tucker Carlson and do whatever it is that the Daily Caller does. One of the latter is Jim Treacher, the Daily Tucker blogger for people who find Mickey Kaus too highbrow. For some reason, he showed up in my Twitter mentions today:

Today I learned from @LemieuxLGM that if a white kid attacked a cop, he'd never get shot because he's in the right club.
Whew!

While racial discrimination in law enforcement is a problem, it would obviously be foolish to think that white people have some sort of blanket immunity from police violence, justified or not. (Let’s leave aside the fact that Treacher, natch, takes the most authoritarian interpretation of the Michael Brown shooting.) So he could not have “learned” this from me, since I don’t believe any such thing and have never written any such thing.

Truly the hack’s hack, Treacher would not identify from which post he “learned” the thing he just made up. But I assume he meant this post, which I now reprint in its entirety:

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty confident that if a unarmed white kid from suburbs was shot dead by the police we wouldn’t be informed by the Paper of Record that he was “no angel” because of a minor alleged shoplifting. And this!

He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar.

But were his jeans too baggy?

It’s not just that Treacher is making his accusation up out of whole cloth. It’s that the post is not even about disparate treatment of African-Americans by the police at all. (My hypothetical, you’ll notice, assumes that a white person from the suburbs could be subject to being killed by the police.) The post is about the disparate treatment of Michael Brown by the media. Even funnier is that the target isn’t even a conservative media outlet. Indeed, a remotely competent conservative hack could have written something about how eventheliberal Scott Lemieux thinks that the New York Times is using strange racial stereotypes in a story about the Brown shooting. Only Treacher 1)is really not at all competent, and 2)he would presumably see nothing objectionable about the Times story if he read it.

So, basically what noble families used to do when they’d nudge second sons into the clergy? Plausible, if subject to bittersweet contemplation of a world in which Tucker’s obnoxiousness was confined to a single bucolic parish.

And den Beste–now there’s a name from the past. Hard to believe that he was a really big deal on the right for a while . . . remember his prediction that the US invasion of Iraq would lead to a naval war with France?

Scott Lemieux

“Remember that living well is the best revenge. A simple corollary of this is that maintaining an anime blog is the opposite of “living well” and thus the worst revenge, so if you are in a pissing match with someone who does spend all his time protesting to the Internet that he really does shut his eyes when the naked cartoon children are on screen, honestly, then all you really have to do is sit tight and wait for history to rack up enough points on your side.”

One of the few things I remember from Den Beste was an analysis of ongoing strikes in France. He thought the unions were trying to cause an economic collapse so that they could lead a Communist revolution. But, he reflected, they would probably fail, and power would ultimately be seized either by Islamists or Fascists. Albeit a more Gaullist form of Fascists.

He’s just intensely, bitterly angry at liberals, and he’s let that rage eat away at his brain. Every once in a while there’s a brief flash of the human being that once was (the occasional fairly insightful comment on a review on the AV Club, for instance) but most of the time now it’s just sub-“I know you are, but what am I” trolling.

This is a guy who, as a matter of record, spent the better part of two weeks posting “Obama eats dogs” anywhere he could. Easily 8 hours a day, probably more.

I apologize to the gods of humor for any pain caused them by posting the above captioned knock knock joke. In my defense, I stole the joke from a Mr Jim Treacher who writes what is alleged to be a satirical blog at “The Daily Caller” website, heretofore referred to as Tucker Carlson’s Twit Farm.

The Scottish Independence Referendum Debate in Kirkwall last week has been posted on tube.

It just amazes me to watch english speaking people talk politics on TV in complete, complex sentences, I can’t watch any american news shows, they’re all one note Otis’s reaching for the buzz feed demographic

Vance Maverick

Can we evaluate your last, uh, periodless stretch there, with regard to the criteria it asserts?

Gregor Sansa

300% complete!

The Pale Scot

I blame America, of course.

Edit: And I’m reading and writing while FCP edits render

Donalbain

That was a completely horrible debacle. My voting intention has now changed towards being in favour of an independent nation, on a small island where we place Eck and Darling as the sole citizens.

Malaclypse

And slightly OT to your OT: it seems the new right-wing talking point is outrage – outrage, I tell you – because Obama sent more officials to Brown’s funeral than Thatcher’s. Aside from thinking this shows obvious good judgement, I keep thinking of this.

rea

That’s just a friggin’ bizarre criticism. The reason there were more White House officials at Brown’s funeral than Thatcher’s, is that White House officials, on the whole, are fairly low level people. E. g.:

For Monday’s funeral, the White House sent two officials with the White House Office of Public Engagement as well as Broderick Johnson, chairman of the My Brother’s Keeper Task Force.

No White House officials, though, were part of the presidential delegation sent last year to Thatcher’s funeral. For that, the White House sent former secretaries of State George Schultz and James Baker III — as well as the charge d’affaires to the U.K. and the former U.S. ambassador.

Just imagine the outcry if the White House had sent two guys from the Office of Public Engagement and Broderick Johnson as the delegation to Thatcher’s funeral

Hogan

What?! He sent former senior diplomats who were appointed by Republicans and actually knew Thatcher? Is there no depth to which Obama will not sink?

tsam

I hope SOMEONE took the initiative to whip it out and take an asparagus tainted leak on Thatcher’s final resting place.

Hogan

That would be George Galloway, I believe.

drkrick

There’s always going to be outcry. It’s just the details that change. It’s like a bad marriage where you know you’re going to be called wrong no matter what you do so you might as well just do whatever you want and make one person happy.

rea

Well, yeah. If Obama had gone personally, they would have lambasted him for ignoring the Boston Marathon Bombing two days before the funeral.

tsam

You’d think these fuckheads would just save themselves the time to invent reasons to be outraged and just keep posting “OH I HATE OBAMA SO MUCH!!” and slam their fists on the dashboards of their F250 trucks for extra effect.

witlesschum

He was going to send the White House Marching 100 with extra drum majors, but was convinced this was in bad taste by No Fun Biden?

timb

Limbaugh was “angry” that more administration flacks went to the funeral of Brown than went to funeral of the General killed in Afghanistan.

Oh, and btw, to continue yesterday’s loviliness, I heard on right wing radio today that Brown punched the cop, went for his weapon, and then bum-rushed him ooooorrrrrr, exactly what I said people who believe Wilson believe

DrS

I don’t think that anyone argued with you that your nonsense take wasn’t something the right would like.

timb

Well, since that was the point I was making…

sharculese

There was no General killed in Afghanistan. It was a prank conducted to prove wingnuts will believe anything bad about Obama.

Most American media is just painfully dumb. And it’s always dumber than I expect, somehow. CNN is dumb. NBC is dumb. The one that frustrates me the most is NPR, especially the way liberals give you that “deer in the headlights” look if you criticize it. As if they never expected this final indignity.

witlesschum

NPR does some good reporting, but they’re much, much, much too dedicated to telling you the Washington consensus of what the news is today.

NPR is pretty horrible. They do the phony “devil’s advocate” shit and present false balances all the time. There are some great shows on there, and Car Talk is supremely awesome, but NPR as a whole isn’t very good.

I would just take the opportunity to note that a mall in this urban area offers a combination Arthur Treacher’s and Kenny Rogers Roasters. The food court should go with this, serving as a repository for all dying fast food chains.

Bruce B.

This made me snort and laugh.

matt w

Thanks. I will admit to stalking this thread relentlessly, looking for an excuse to introduce Naughty by Nature.

tsam

I hate it when you have a joke like that burning a hole in your pocket. But finally letting that sucker off the chain is SOOOO cathartic…

Bruce B.

Didn’t Aeneas and his men eat a dinner served on top of this guy, thereby fulfilling a prophecy intended to be of doom? (No, you’re thinking of trenchers.)

rea

Didn’t he grow a long black beard and terrorize the seas? No, you’re thinking of Edward Teach . . .

joe from Lowell

No, Scott, this isn’t incompetence.

The right wing in this country has decided to rally around the killer cop. Michelle Malkin had a column titled “The War Against the Police.”

Treacher knows exactly what he’s doing; changing the subject to the ground he wants to fight on.

sharculese

The right wing as a whole knows what it’s doing. Michelle Malkin knows what she’s doing (as long as it doesn’t involve videos).

That doesn’t mean Treacher knows what he’s doing, and all the evidence points to he does not.

JMP

I would say this is surprising, but considering that the right recently decided to rally around a wannabe cop and vigilante who murdered an unarmed teenager just because he was black, it sadly isn’t. They really think that it should be OK for white people to murder young black men, and anytime it happens there must be some reason the young black guy deserved it. It’s sickening.

joe from Lowell

They think this is a great time to bring back the Reagan/Nixon “Tough on Crime” play book.

It’s a good thing that 1982 isn’t three decades in the past, or that strategy might turn out to be a major blunder.

Aimai

Someone, somewhere on these here internets, pulled up a screen shot of the approving comments that went with the fundraiser for PO Wilson. Most of them were basically “Yay! You stood up for white people by shooting that black kid” but one of them was interestingly sceptical. Basically it was a racist libertarian dude who managed (wish I could find the exact quote) to say “sure, it was just a thuggy N*** kid who got shot but for god’s sake how can you people support the militarization of the police and the fact that we good amurrikans are all at risk from Obama’s storm troopers? Shouldn’t this give us a tiny bit of a pause?”

IM

Daily Kos I think

witlesschum

It’s really cool how wrong-footed they seem by the whole War on Women framing. They’re obviously flummoxed and trying everything (except changing their woman-abusing policies, obviously) to fight back and it’s really not going well. And then they try to imitate it, like here, but they’ve not found something that sticks yet. Good job, Democrats.

I think they have a winner in the War on Christmas. There’s nothing ridiculous about that.

Nobdy

It’s actually pretty surprising how few white kids DO get shot when they attack cops. I can’t remember the last one. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, it probably does in areas where poor whites are the underclass, but it seems pretty rare given populations.

Note that I am not accepting the premise that Michael Brown “attacked” a cop.

joe from Lowell

The police in places with meaningful numbers of poor white people come from those poor white communities.

Warren Terra

Seems relevant (cover image of the St Louis Post Dispatch showing percent Black for residents versus cops in what I take to be St Louis-area communities)

Police violence absolutely deserves more attention than it gets. I used to read Radley Balko until the numbers of injured civilians whose cases were ignored for overwhelming, and my sons reached their teens. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night again if I thought about this issues very often.

Aimai

I think you are wrong about this, Nobdy. White people get shot by police quite a lot–its the aftermath that is the issue. There’s always a tendency to sweep it under the rug but the families of the victims get slightly better treatment.

I just came across the case of some guy in Barnstable who was shot to death by the cops. He had a long history of mental illness but he was a young guy. He became depressed and suicidal, fired a gun into the police station, was hunted down by the police and shot several times in the back, although the Police originally reported it as in the front. The grieving and enraged father had posted the autopsy and revised autopsy reports on the wall of a restaurant I was eating in. The selectmen had forced him to take down his impromptu memorial to his son’s shooting death from the street and he was protesting that as well. The kids friends and family rallied around him and protested, briefly, the police shooting but because the guy was mentally ill and mentally ill people and their families don’t have much of a voice or ability to fight back the protest went nowhere and the police received commendations for bravery in shooting the guy. Still, the father and the family were treated with some sympathy by the community and the selectmen. It was very much a feeling of “well, there but for the grace of god go I” in the newspaper reports.

Aimai

Weirdly Dkos is reporting a nearly identical scenario to the Cape Cod story I just posted here. This one happened in Kansas. I’m pretty sure the kid was white but what struck me aside from the similarities to the Cape Cod story I alluded to was this, bolded here:

As I was looking, they kept getting closer. They pulled the guns out. They kept getting closer and closer. You could hear them tell him to, ‘Get down, get down,'” said witness Houston Harris.

“By the time I got to my son, he maneuvered away from me,” said Bruton. “He went up toward the cop, he done something with his hand and about 15 to 16 cops shot rounds off on him, in his chest, his legs, everything.”

Family members said there have been confusing reports about what happened, including conflicting reports about whether Jennings actually had a gun.

Family members said police have made several recent trips to their home. They said the young man had been having suicidal thoughts because of painful seizures and had tried to overdose on Friday.

Jennings aunt Brandy Smith, who was at the scene on Saturday, said police wouldn’t let her intervene. She said she could have helped Jennings get the help he needed.

“I never thought it would hit this close to home,” she said. “My condolences go out to the victims of the Ferguson incident. I’m living it, too. The overkill and the police department not knowing how to handle those with disabilities.”

I am not saying that the killing of Michael Brown wasn’t the result of stone racism, because it was–the treatment of the entire of the town of Ferguson before and after the shooting is entirely due to racism and classism and downright oppression. But the police are also, generally speaking, out of control and out of techniques when it comes to dealing with any person they deem non compliant for any reason. Mentally ill? Deaf? Absent Minded? Minding your own business? Male and badly dressed? Male or female and black? Black children? Once The police are simply not being trained to handle what they perceive to be non compliant people. A good police officer, from the point of view of his police cohort and leaders, is one who can exact compliance instantly from those around him and sort them out later.

rea

Evil racists will sometimes do things that aren’t particularly racist, but still evil.

witlesschum

This. Cops will shoot everyone, but mostly poor, black men. Doug Henwood had sociologist Alex Vitale on his show two weeks ago and he explained it as the cops are basically detailed to harass poor people and poor communities of whatever color. He calls it “hyper policing” and it means creating more charged, more confrontational encounters between the cops and the people they police than is strictly necessary for the crime that’s happening. Add racism and fear on the part of the police and the feeling of being under siege by people in poor or minority communities and we get what we got.

wengler

And the mystery as to why black people don’t vote for Republicans continues…

CP

It’s the honest bewilderment that gets me. I used to think they were just trolling, but they’re not. They sincerely do not understand why women, minorities and gay people don’t vote for them in greater numbers. It just doesn’t compute. And the fact that straight white Christian men are increasingly the only demographic in America that votes for them never makes them question whether, “if everyone in your life is an asshole, maybe it’s you.”

To quote from earlier upthread, not bad faith: really that stupid.

MAJeff

They sincerely do not understand why women, minorities and gay people don’t vote for them in greater numbers.

One thing here, though. They don’t want gay people to vote for them. They are definitely delusional enough to think they are loving people who say nothing offensive about gay folks, but they are definitely happy excluding us. They’d love to imprison or deport us.

Bruce B.

But they also want LGBT votes! I’ve talked with or witnessed explanations from enough right-wingers to think they’re sincere about it. In their heads is the image of someone doing his or her part to support destroying the social safety net, making more wars, and all that, and not complaining when it’s time to go to the camps because he or she understands how it’s all for the greater good.

They think that the rest of us all know what’s truly right and wrong just as much as they do. So anything we might say about, oh, voting against the idea of camps for anyone to go to isn’t really basic voting in one’s self-interest, it’s just calculated opposition to truth and goodness. Voting for one’s own annihilation is therefore some kind of act of penance.

The puzzlement isn’t the “Why doesn’t this person like me?” variety, it’s the “Why has my dog stopped obeying me?” or “Why doesn’t that kid I beat up hand over his lunch money?”

witlesschum

This. Especially with black people, like when Rand Paul tried to teach history to a bunch of kids at Howard who I’m sure know a lot more about black political history than Rand Paul will. They basically thought black undergrads were as dumb as the Reason comment section, where I’d heard most of Paul’s talking points before. I’m not sure if Paul is that dumb or just calculated it was too his advantage no matter what.

But, I think it’s also not the whole bunch by any means that are honestly confused. There are well-meaning types, sure, but there’s also the bunch that just hates people who are poor and doesn’t much care for people who are black. Unlike their political progenitors, they’re willing to make exceptions for black conservatives who are willing to stroke their egos properly. So, y’know, progress.

CP

Sure, it’s not universal, there’s no one-size-fits-all explanation. But “they just don’t get it” is a theme that seems to run through just about all of them that I’ve met.

Hogan

Black people are disproportionately victims of crime. Police fight crime. Therefore black people support the police. We support the police. Therefore it makes sense for black people to support us.

So why are they being so irrational? They must also be victims of Democrat propaganda/coercion. We just have to keep yelling at them until they realize that.

drkrick

They seem to be under the impression that black people and women should vote for them to pressure the GOP to adopt policies they like better. They don’t get that the process is actually supposed to work the other way around.

tsam

Yeah–that’s a lesson that politicians never seem to learn. See Labor and Democrats. When you feel like you can rely on their vote, you don’t care to put the effort into doing the right thing.

tsam

I have a lot of honest bewilderment as to why any women, minorities and gay people would ever vote for those pricks. Many of them do. The very existence of the Log Cabin Republicans just baffles all the shit right out of me.

timb

It’s a choice of priorities and to Log Cabin Republicans, tax rates are more important than rights.

Now I feel kind of bad for the guy. That Twitter feed is just a spiral staircase into depressive, drunken gloom. I had similar bouts before I gave up social media for good.

Of course, none of said depressed diatribes were intended to excuse and justify years of vicious, professional race-baiting. I’m not going to give him a pass for that shit, but I really pity him more than despise him now.

Man, I hope the guy gets some help. He’s clearly suffering a great deal. I know from experience that focusing that pain into anger and aggression makes it feel better in the short term, but it eats you from the inside out before too long.

Jewish Steel

Maybe he’ll swing by and show off his comedy chops!

sharculese

As someone who posts in a place where he not infrequently shows up to try to crack the funny, please please let this not happen.

Back before he was being paid that sweet, sweet TV dinner money to troll professionally, he did manage to entertain on occasion in the comments at alicublog and World-o-Crap. That was back when he wrote more than one sentence a comment. Now it’s just “You seem angry ;)”, which is basically the Yahoo Answers level of trolling.

Believe it or not, that’s not his real name. So yes, he chose a Dickensian name for a reason.

witlesschum

I think of an unpleasant house elf.

GeoX

If you’re unlucky, you may remember Medlock from Roy’s VV column back in the day where he made hundred and hundreds of posts to the extremely non-racist effect that OBAMA EATS DOGS. I’m pretty sure on some level he sees behavior like this as a kind of trolling performance-art thing–like Chris Muir, he’s one of these wingnuts under the sad delusion that he’s really cool and edgy–but even beyond the fact that he’s just an asshole, it seems to me to indicate that, like Jeff Goldstein, he has some serious chemical imbalances somewhere in his brain.

He seriously spent something like 12 hours that day posting nothing but that — and it wasn’t even just at VV. He seriously must have had multiple browsers open, reloading constantly just so he could copy-paste “Obama eats dogs” and “Has Obama stopped eating dogs yet”, etc.

Goldstein is definitely the best comparison. A thin, transparent mask of too-cool-for-school over a lump of suppurating chancres of bitterness and hate.

oops. should have read further down, I included a response to a comment upthread about that. Yeah, he was doing that at several blogs– the dog eating thing seemed to be possessing his brain like those pizza-beasts in the Original Star Trek would possess their victims.

FMguru

I vaguely recall him getting loose in the comments section of one blog (Balloon Juice? Sadly No?) some years ago and spending almost 24 hours straight posting his nonsense. The guy literally stayed up around the clock so he could post variations of “I know you are but what am I?” over and over and over again.

A life well lived, that. Almost as well-lived a life as Steven den Beste.

He used to hang out at World-o-Crap whenever someone even mentioned him in comments. I wondered if he had a script that searched Google for his name.

Larrry

Really, a conservative writer does not have to be smart and is especially well served by not being so. It eliminates the strain of cognitive dissonance. A typical conservative writer is satisfied with knowing how to read and write, though that includes neither reading comprehension or writing comprehension. What these stupidly dumb conservative writers are doing is finger-painting on bathroom walls using the most accessible medium.

Really, a conservative writer does not have to be smart and is especially well served by not being so.

Good point. Seems like the profession would self-select for folks who don’t mind making dumb arguments over and over.

tsam

I would think that since they’re administering to a crowd of people for whom cognitive dissonance is their entire reality, they would need the ability to recognize it in order to properly feed it. I could be wrong, though.

brad

He’s tweeted again looking for more attention.

This kind of trolling is basically equivalent to a middle schooler being a dick to a girl he has a crush on. He knows he’ll never be good enough for you, Scott, but damned if he doesn’t want you to acknowledge his existence.

It occurs to me that I’ve jaywalker millions of times here in Indy and never been run over by the State Department. Perhaps, Sean/Jim should have stayed here in our backwater, rather than venture to the big city. Like Prometheus, he just flew to close to the Sun!!!